I admit to being hesitant to write more about pornographic entrepreneur Lily Philips, on the basis that most of what she does appears to be seeking attention and publicity, and writing about her in any way necessarily furthers that goal for her.
But of course, she’s getting attention whether I write about her or not. This clip of her with youtube documentarian Josh Pieters, recorded immediately after she had just had sex with 100 men over the course of a few hours, has been viewed now almost 200 million times:
Besides, I keep returning to the topic of Phillips – well, in that this is my second piece on her in a matter of six weeks or so – because I find her, and what she represents, endlessly interesting.
Interesting because, on the one hand, she is the literal endpoint of the sexual revolution. You wanted sexual liberation, folks? Well here it is. There is nobody on earth more sexually liberated than Miss Phillips.
Of course, many people are concerned about what this says about modern womanhood. My colleague Maria is one of them, and set out her reasons yesterday, here:
“The Lilly Phillips story is horrifying, and OF should be banned. But her story, how this was allowed to happen and was cheered on by those around her, is a flashing red flag regarding a culture that is broken. More and more people, when they see stories like this, call it degeneracy, and I’d agree it’s time to call behaviour like this out, on the part of men and women, for what it really is.
There’s another aspect in this that is rarely discussed: the role people like Lilly Philips (and her mother, who is her finance manager) play in debasing and demeaning other women. A society which increasingly sees women as sexual objects is a more dangerous society for all woman, of all ages, online and in the real world.”
Maria, as a woman, is mostly concerned about the impact on women. But what about the impact on men?
The real victims of this culture, I’d argue, are her customers, who don’t even seem to know it. The real victims are the tens of thousands of young men – and not so young men – who are becoming so stupefied by porn that they’re becoming incapable of living normal lives or having normal sexual relationships with normal women.
Think, for a moment, about those 100 poor saps who lined up for the opportunity to insert themselves for five minutes into a porn star. Self-evidently, they were abusing her. But ask yourself in turn how broken they must be to consider that a fulfilling or worthwhile sexual experience for them. Almost worse again, consider the 40,000 men who pay a monthly fee to Phillips just so they could watch 100 other men have sex with her.
Consider the kind of man who is aroused – or who has been trained by porn to be aroused – by the sight of 100 men having sex with one woman. Consider all the filth he has wallowed in to get to that point, and the hundreds and thousands of videos he must have watched to become so desensitised from normality as to find that situation arousing. Read this account of porn addiction published just last week by the BBC. As one specialist in treating porn addiction notes:
“But increasingly, our clients are in their 20s and 30s, many of whom are single, who are recognising the growing toll of porn use on their lives and on their ability to get or maintain a relationship.”
Phillips is just one of literally hundreds of thousands of women with an Onlyfans. And her numbers are tiny compared to the daily consumption of pornography. One Roman Catholic Priest I know tells me that the number one issue he encounters amongst young Catholic men – catholic men – is porn addiction. I don’t think there’s anything in particular about being a catholic that makes you more or less at risk of that addiction, though there might at least be something that makes you more willing to admit and confront it.
I come back to the figures from around the world that show young people having less sex, and less satisfying sex, than ever before. I come back to the image of Ms Phillips, red-eyed from all the semen ritually ejaculated on her face by a hundred men she didn’t know, crying while she insists that she’s really very happy to have done what she did. I come back to the sad cases, in their bedrooms, hunched one-handed over a computer screen watching it all unfold.
And then I think of those stories that you now read with depressing regularity of what the first steps into the sexual world are like for so many young women and teenagers at the hand of porn-addled men and boys: Men who choke them and spit on them and call them sluts and whores and ask them if they like it, and think flirting involves sending “dick pics” online.
And I think of the endless cases in the Irish courts of men who’ve become so inured and immune to regular boring old porn that they seek out the illegal and the “exotic”, when they’re depressed and “curious”. And the careers ruined, and the families destroyed, by people who get on the internet and just can’t stop clicking. And clicking.
I think too of Kagney Lynn Karter, a 36 year old woman who was once the most famous porn actress in America and the winner of every award the “adult industry” had to offer. Earlier this year, she put a shotgun in her mouth and pulled the trigger, and ended her life before it even reached middle age.
This is the sexual revolution. This is what it has wrought. We owe it to ourselves, if nothing else, to look Lily Phillips right in her red-eyed, distraught face.
One does not have to be a prude, or a conservative, or religious, or right wing, to be absolutely horrified by all of this. One just needs to be a relatively normal person with even a hint of empathy for other people.
Whatever else Lily Phillips is, she is clearly a millionaire, possibly dozens of times over. In fact, it is beyond any shadow of a doubt that she has made more money doing what she’s doing than many young women who try and make money in much more wholesome ways. But would you have your daughter trade places with her? Or your sister?
What does the porn industry do to women like Lily Phillips? It exploits the very natural but very powerful sex instinct. It exploits vulnerable women and vulnerable men, increasingly teenagers. It’s uses and degrades in an extreme way women, and encourages men to use them and degrade them, and treat them as objects. It completely bastardises the sex instinct, which, across all cultures and most religious traditions was used to bring men and women together.
The porn industry does the exact opposite: it drives the sexes apart and gets one to exploit the other in a deeply damaging and profoundly unnatural way. That’s what’s happening here, even if we may not agree about who exactly is exploiting whom.
We have a duty to look it right in the face, and confront it.